The World: More Revelations on Bombing

While bombs fell in the wrong places, the dubious beginnings of U.S. military activities in Cambodia were being laid bare in Washington. Former Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird has insisted for three weeks that he never ordered falsification of any documents to hide U.S. air and ground activities in Cambodia and Laos in 1969 and 1970. Last week, however, that flat denial apparently became inoperative. The Senate Armed Services Committee, which has been investigating what is being called “the Cambodian cover-up,” released a top-secret 1969 memorandum, which showed that Laird had approved falsified reporting to hide bombing raids.

Dated Nov. 20, 1969, some seven months after the clandestine bombing began, the memorandum came from General Earle G. Wheeler, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and was initialed by Laird. It recommended that a 41-plane force of B-52s strike targets inside Cambodia while other B-52s bombed cover targets in South Viet Nam and Laos. The memorandum added: “Strikes on these latter targets will provide a resemblance to normal operations, thereby providing a credible story for replies to press inquiries.” Despite the memorandum, Laird still insisted that he had not authorized any falsification—just a special reporting procedure for the secret bombing.

The memorandum was the closest the committee has yet come during its month of hearings to pinning down who authorized the secret “double entry” reporting technique used by the Administration to hide the raids from the American people and Congress. Previous testimony established that B-52s had dropped more than 100,000 tons of bombs in 3,630 unreported missions onto suspected North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia during 14 months in 1969 and 1970. Last week, before adjourning until fall, the hearings turned up these other military activities in Southeast Asia, which hitherto had been kept secret:

> Communist hospitals were routine targets. Former Air Force Captain Gerald J. Greven, a forward air controller in Viet Nam in 1969, testified that hospitals were on lists of targets that he used to direct air strikes. The Air Force denied Greven’s allegations, but former Army Intelligence Specialist Allan Stevenson told the committee that North Vietnamese hospitals had third priority for U.S. bombers, behind fixed installations and troop concentrations. He explained that hospitals were “legitimate and desirable targets” because they usually were centers for large numbers of troops, as well as headquarters and underground tunnel systems.

> Not only B-52s but tactical fighter-bombers as well raided deep into Cambodia in 1970 and 1971. Former Air Force Captain George R. Moses testified that he was told to falsify tactical strikes by fighter-bombers inside Cambodia soon after the April 1970 incursion by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. Previously, Wheeler had said that such attacks were limited to 30 miles from the border, but Moses told the committee that some strikes were as much as 100 miles inside Cambodia. He testified that the clandestine tactical strikes continued for eleven months after the U.S. invasion of Cambodia was supposed to have ended.

> U.S. troops were operating on the ground in Cambodia and Laos as early as 1966 and continued until at least April 1972. In 1971, testified former Sergeant Thomas J. Marzullo, “at the time the President said there were no Americans in Laos, we had two teams of men inserted on the ground.”

At the same time that the committee was hearing new revelations of secret U.S. military activities, critics were energetically trying—and failing—to get the U.S. bombing of Cambodia declared illegal. In Boston, Federal Judge Joseph Tauro dismissed an anti-bombing suit brought by four Congressmen on the ground that the court had no jurisdiction. Similarly, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City overturned a lower judge’s ruling of July 25 that the bombing was “unauthorized and unlawful” and must be stopped. That suit had been brought by Representative Elizabeth Holtzman and four Air Force officers. Last week Chief Justice Warren Burger refused to call a special session of the Supreme Court to hear the case, meaning that the bombing could continue until the Tuesday-midnight deadline.